More waffle than Wolf Hall

The adaptation of CJ Sansom’s Tudor-set Shardlake’ novels barely balances the scales between history and mystery, writes Nick Hilton, but features a progressive protagonist

- Nick Hilton

British schoolchildren are only really taught about three periods of history. The Second World War, naturally, the industrial revolution, inexplicably, and Tudor England, thankfully. The last is a source of gratitude because, in its twists and turns, its heroes and villains, the story of Tudor England stands alongside Renaissance Florence and Julius Caesar’s Rome as one of history’s great canvases. A smart place to set a whodunit, then, as Disney+ has done with a new four-part series, Shardlake.

Matthew Shardlake (Arthur Hughes) is a shrewd lawyer in the employ of Thomas Cromwell (Sean Bean), the close confidant, and scarcely leashed pitbull, of Henry VIII. When one of Cromwell’s dogsbodies is brutally murdered in a remote monastery he has been sent to inspect, Shardlake is dispatched as the king’s official inquisitor. But when Shardlake and sidekick Jack Barak (Masters of the Air’s Anthony Boyle) arrive at Scarnsea, they find a community racked not just by the pain of the dissolution process, but by a violent current rippling within their midst. “This house is rotten to the core,” Barak observes, as the bodies get brought up.